[wellylug] Need some help with Gentoo

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <20030602045431.7557DAE2A0 at basilica.la.naos.co.nz>, Ewen McNeill writes:
>In message <1054527327.670.2.camel at Planet_Irk>, Jamie Dobbs writes:
>>>[Mounted VFAT permissions "wrong"]
>>
>>I fully understand your explanation but I honestly can't see how that
>>works. The same thing would work find under Mandrake and RadHat with no
>>problems so why won't it work with Gentoo? [....]
>[...]
>If there's more than one user that should manipulate them the "best"
>approach would be to stick all those users in a group, and mount the
>VFAT file systems gid=THATGROUP, and umask=0770 or umask=0775.  
>[....]
>If you just don't care that everyone can write to the files, mount the
>filesystem with umask=0777 and be done with it.

That'll have to be umask=007 or umask=002 actually (and umask=000 for the
last one).  All these umasks are backwards from what I would "obviously"
expect (ie, violate the principle of least surprise), and I didn't stop
long enough to remember that before posting.  Whoops.

>>If this is an example of the 'quality' of Gentoo then I fear that they
>>are wasting their time!

One final comment about this.  One of the nice things about Unix/Linux
is that generally there is a sensible, not-too-hard-to-find-out
explanation for why things are different on two systems.  Which means
once you figure it out, you can make the "wrong" system like the "right"
one.  This is a pleasant contrast to some OS I've dealt with where 
"why is it different" is not infrequently answered "nobody knows", and
"how do I get it like that" is not infrequently answered with "have you
tried reinstalling".

Ewen